i spent the morning fussing with the gamer rig, not booting, hard disk read error messages, partially booting then freezing, and then hard disk not found message when i decided to reformat and start over from scratch,....just when i had everything open and was ready to pull the new velociraptor and rma back to the egg, i thot "i better check this cable" and it's a good thing i did,....changed the sata cable to an old tried and true asus sata and booted right up faster than ever...wat a pita !

Looks like a biostar cable, if it is one gave me a hard time on a new ssd, after a week of errors and no boots I changed it and worked perfect . Always the first thing you should check but always the final step before rma and a lot of headaches.

Looks like a biostar cable, if it is one gave me a hard time on a new ssd, after a week of errors and no boots I changed it and worked perfect . Always the first thing you should check but always the final step before rma and a lot of headaches.

man ! ,...good eye spike !! ...yup it's an old biostar cable that was left over from a repair job i did like last year, or before that even,...i haven't had any complaints or issues from that job, so it must be just this..

When any of my HDD or ODD doesn't work, the first thing I always do is to check that drive with other SATA cables.
Most of those cables lasts ~2 years after 24x7 use. Actually, what more can we expect from those cheap cables?
Glad that's only SATA cable in your case too.